Lowe argues for a dualistic account of mental causation. He claims that the agent’s decision as well as a neural event both causally determine the resulting behavior in parallel and complementary ways. The decision determines that the arm arising occurs at all but it does not determine the detailed physical parameters of the movement. The neural cause determines the detailed parameters but does not deter-mine that the movement occurs. Lowe’s main argument for this view is the argument from counterfactual implications, (...) which also undermines the psychoneural token-identity thesis. He argues that if the mental event token (the decision to raise an arm) had not occurred, the arm would not have risen, while if the neural event token (the complex neural event, which causes the arm to rise) had not occurred, the arm would still have risen albeit slightly differently. I first raise two counterexamples. Parallel arguments can be constructed to show that token identity fails at other micro-macro junctures. A token splash of hot water could be argued not to be identical with the token event of the motions of H 2 O molecules characterized by appropriate kinetic energy. A token expression of the will of the people could be argued not to be identical with the token event of such and such voting behavior on an election day. I then diagnose the problems with Lowe’s arguments for either counterfactual. The argument for the mental counterfactual relies on a premise that is quite plausibly false. The argument for the neural counterfactual is questionable because it involves the application of the possible-worlds semantics to counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents. His argument against the token-identity thesis thus fails and his dualistic ac-count of mental causation is called into question. (shrink)

In Constructing the World, Chalmers seeks to articulate and defend an important epistemic accessibility thesis, the Scrutability of Truth, which is crucial to Chalmers’ rationalist approach to meaning and modality. Chapters 3 and 4 of the book are devoted to persuading us that the move from weaker to stronger forms of Scrutability is intuitively plausible. In these comments, I want to question this move. The plausibility of strong forms of Scrutability hinges on controversial views about epistemic norms for answering ‘what (...) is x?’ questions that semantic externalists have good reason to reject. (shrink)

As the title, The Entangled State of God and Humanity suggests, this webinar dispenses with the pre-Copernican, patriarchal, anthropomorphic image of God while presenting a case for a third millennium theology illuminated by insights from archetypal depth psychology, quantum physics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. It attempts to smash the conceptual barriers between science and religion. The published work of C.G. Jung, Wolfgang Pauli, David Bohm and Teilhard de Chardin outline a process whereby matter evolves in increasing complexity from sub-atomic particles (...) to the human brain and the emergence of a reflective consciousness leading to a noosphere evolving towards an Omega point. The noosphere is the envelope of consciousness and meaning superimposed upon the biosphere a concept central to the evolutionary thought of Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man). -/- His central ideas, like those of Jung with his archetypes, in particular that of the Self, provide intimations of a numinous principle implicit in cosmology and the discovery that in and through humanity, evolution becomes not only conscious of itself but also directed and purposive. Although in Jung’s conception it was a “late-born offspring of the unconscious soul”, consciousness has become the mirror which the universe has evolved to reflect upon itself and in which its very existence is revealed. The implication for process theology is that God and humanity are in an entangled state so that the evolution of God cannot be separated from that of humankind. A process (Incarnational) theology inseminated by the theory of evolution is one in which humankind completes the individuation of God towards the wholeness represented for instance in cosmic mandala symbols (Jung, Collected Works, vol. 11). Jung believed that God needs humankind to become conscious, whole and complete, a thesis explored in my book The Individuation of God: Integrating Science and Religion (Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications 2012). (shrink)

The famous ethological maxim known as “Morgan’s Canon” continues to be the subject of interpretive controversy. I reconsider Morgan’s canon in light of two questions: First, what did Morgan intend? Second, is this, or perhaps some re-interpretation of the canon, useful within cognitive ethology? As for the first issue, Morgan’s distinction between higher and lower faculties is suggestive of an early supervenience concept. As for the second, both the canon in its original form, and various recent re-readings, offer nothing useful (...) to cognitive ethology. (shrink)

This is an essay on McDowell’s naturalism. It is, pace some commentators, argued that McDowell’s naturalism does not end up in any strange metaphysical positions in the philosophy of mind, because second nature non-reductively supervenes on first nature and have causal powers. Pace certain other commentators, it is also argued that McDowell can be read as drawing a clear line between ethical platonism, and his own naturalized platonism, but only at the cost of landing in standard naturalism.

We evaluate the scope of Jaegwon Kim's “supervenience argument” for reduction. Does its conclusion apply only to psychology, or does it generalize to all the special sciences? The claim that the supervenience argument generalizes to all the special sciences if it goes through for psychology is often raised as an objection to the supervenience argument. We argue that this objection is ambiguous. We distinguish three readings of it and suggest that some of them make it a plausible claim, whereas other (...) readings make it implausible. We suggest that this ambiguity is the result of picturing the world as being hierarchically organized in levels, with the domain of physics at the bottom and the domains of the social sciences at the top. The plausibility of the objection depends on how we think of this picture. This popular picture, we suggest, involves three different dimensions along which reduction may occur. (shrink)

Most meanings we express belong to large families of variant meanings, among which it would be implausible to suppose that some are much more apt for being expressed than others. This abundance of candidate meanings creates pressure to think that the proposition attributing any particular meaning to an expression is modally plastic: its truth depends very sensitively on the exact microphysical state of the world. However, such plasticity seems to threaten ordinary counterfactuals whose consequents contain speech reports, since it is (...) hard to see how we could reasonably be confident in a counterfactual whose consequent can be true only if a certain very finely tuned microphysical configuration obtains. This essay develops the foregoing puzzle and explores several possible solutions. (shrink)

The causal exclusion argument suggests that mental causes are excluded in favour of the underlying physical causes that do all the causal work. Recently, a debate has emerged concerning the possibility of avoiding this conclusion by adopting Woodward's interventionist theory of causation. Both proponents and opponents of the interventionist solution crucially rely on the notion of supervenience when formulating their positions. In this article, we consider the relation between interventionism and supervenience in detail and argue that importing supervenience relations into (...) the interventionist framework is deeply problematic. However, rather than reject interventionist solutions to exclusion wholesale, we wish to propose that the problem lies with the concept of supervenience. This would open the door for a moderate defence of the interventionist solution to the exclusion argument. (shrink)

Here I offer a precise analysis of what it takes for a property to count as emergent. The features widely considered crucial to emergence include novelty, unpredictability, supervenience, relationality, and downward causal influence. By acknowledging each of these distinctive features, the definition provided below captures an important sense in which the whole can be more than the sum of its parts.

This paper is concerned with the notions of supervenience and mechanistic constitution as they have been discussed in the philosophy of neuroscience. Since both notions essentially involve specific dependence and determination relations among properties and sets of properties, the question arises whether the notions are systematically connected and how they connect to science. In a first step, some definitions of supervenience and mechanistic constitution are presented and tested for logical independence. Afterwards, certain assumptions fundamental to neuroscientific inquiry are made explicit (...) in order to show that the presented definitions of supervenience are virtually uninteresting for theory construction in this field. In a third step, a new formulation of supervenience is developed that makes explicit reference to the notion of constitution and that bridges the gap between the philosophical concepts and explanatory practice in neuroscience. (shrink)

Turing's celebrated 1950 paper proposes a very general methodological criterion for modelling mental function: total functional equivalence and indistinguishability. His criterion gives rise to a hierarchy of Turing Tests, from subtotal ("toy") fragments of our functions (t1), to total symbolic (pen-pal) function (T2 -- the standard Turing Test), to total external sensorimotor (robotic) function (T3), to total internal microfunction (T4), to total indistinguishability in every empirically discernible respect (T5). This is a "reverse-engineering" hierarchy of (decreasing) empirical underdetermination of the theory (...) by the data. Level t1 is clearly too underdetermined, T2 is vulnerable to a counterexample (Searle's Chinese Room Argument), and T4 and T5 are arbitrarily overdetermined. Hence T3 is the appropriate target level for cognitive science. When it is reached, however, there will still remain more unanswerable questions than when Physics reaches its Grand Unified Theory of Everything (GUTE), because of the mind/body problem and the other-minds problem, both of which are inherent in this empirical domain, even though Turing hardly mentions them. (shrink)

This is a short response to a paper by Trenton Merricks in which he argues against the following doctrine: Microphysical Supervenience (MS) Necessarily, if atoms A1 through An compose an object that exemplifies intrinsic qualitative properties Q1 through Qn, then atoms like A1 through An (in all their respective intrinsic qualitative properties), related to one another by all the same restricted atom-to-atom relations as A1 through An, compose an object that exemplifies Q1 through Qn.

I put forward and defend the thesis (Th) that psychophysical supervenience (PS) in its full generality can be satisfactorily supported if and only if one is willing to make one or another of some substantial assumptions (the Assumptions) about the nature of mental and physical properties. I first deal with the “if” part of the claim by presenting and considering the Assumptions. I then argue for the inadequacy of suggestions of support for PS that do not require any of the (...) Assumptions. Finally, I show that as a result of (Th) a PS claim is made potentially stronger than what it would be if (Th) were false. (shrink)

Functional reductionism concerning mental properties has recently been advocated by Jaegwon Kim in order to solve the problem of the 'causal exclusion' of the mental. Adopting a reductionist strategy first proposed by David Lewis, he regards psychological properties as being 'higher-order' properties functionally defined over 'lower-order' properties, which are causally efficacious. Though functional reductionism is compatible with the multiple realizability of psychological properties, it is blocked if psychological properties are subdivided or crosscut by neurophysiological properties. I argue that there is (...) recent evidence from cognitive neuroscience that shows that this is the case for the psychological property of fear. Though this may suggest that some psychological properties should be revised in order to conform to those of neurophysiology, the history of science demonstrates that this is not always the outcome, particularly with properties that play an important role in our folk theories and are central to human concerns. (shrink)

On a widely shared assumption, our mental states supervene on our microphysical properties – that is, microphysical supervenience is true. When this thesis is combined with the apparent truism that human persons have proper parts, a grave difficulty arises: what prevents some of these proper parts from being themselves thinkers as well? How can I know that I am a human person and not a smaller thinker enclosed in a human person? Most solutions to this puzzle make radical, if not (...) absurd, claims. Recently, however, Michael Burke and Howard Robinson proposed conservative solutions that, according to them, do not have such undesired consequences. This paper argues that the conservative solutions tacitly assume at least one of the radical ones, and therefore they provide no alternative to the extreme solutions. (shrink)

An important part of the mind-brain problem arises because sentience and consciousness seem inherently resistant to scientific explanation and understanding. The solution to this dilemma is to recognize, first, that scientific explanation can only render comprehensible a selected aspect of what there is, and second, that there is a mode of explanation and understanding, the personalistic, quite different from, but just as viable as, scientific explanation. In order to understand the mental aspect of brain processes - that aspect we know (...) about as a result of having relevant neurological processes occur in our own brain - we need to avail ourselves of personalistic explanation, irreducible to scientific explanation. The problem of explaining and understanding why experiential or mental aspects of brain processes or things should be correlated with certain physical processes, things or states of affairs is a non-problem because there is no kind of explanation possible in terms of which an explanation could be couched. A physical theory, amplified to include the experiential, might be predictive but would, necessarily, cease to be explanatory; and an amplified personalistic explanation could not succeed either. There is, in short, an explanation as to why there cannot be an explanation of correlations between physical and mental aspects of processes going on inside our heads. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine, from a metaphysical point of view, a recent notable attempt by Jaegwon Kim to explain how macro-events are dependent on micro-events and how causal transactions between macro-events are dependent on causal transactions between micro-events.

The doctrine of Microphysical Supervenience (MS) states that: Necessarily, if atoms A1 through An compose an object that exemplified intrinsic qualitative properties Q1 through Qn, then atoms like A1 through An (in all their respective intrinsic qualitative properties), related to one another by all the same restricted atom-to-atom relations as A1 through An, compose an object that exemplifies Q1 through Qn. I show that MS entails a contradiction and so must be rejected. And my argument against MS provides the resources (...) to show that Global Microphysical Supervenience (GMS) is false. GMS states that possible worlds qualitatively exactly alike at the microphysical level are qualitatively exactly alike at the macrophysical level. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to discuss some recent variants of familiar puzzles concerning the relations of parts to wholes put forward by Trenton Merricks and Eric Olson. The argument is put forward that so long as the familiar distinction between 'loose and popular' and 'strict and philosophical' senses of identity claims is accepted the paradoxical conclusions at which Merricks and Olson arrive can be resisted. It is not denied that accepting the distinction between 'loose and popular' and 'strict (...) and philosophical' senses of identity claims is itself a departure from common-sense, but it is argued that it is the smallest such departure available to us. (shrink)

Supervenience is one of the 'hot discoveries' of recent analytic philosophy, and this collection of new essays on the topic represents a 'state of the art' examination of it and its application to major areas of philosophy. The interest in supervenience has much to do with the flexibility of the concept. To say that x supervenes on y indicates a degree of dependence without committing one to the view that x can be reduced to y. Thus supervenience is a relationship (...) that has the potential of replacing the traditional notion of dependence, while performing at least part of the function reductive relationships were supposed to fulfil. Moreover, since it is a topic-neutral concept, supervenience has a wide range of applicability. (shrink)

Although Ross & Spurrett (R&S) successfully fend off the threat of Kim's “supervenience argument” by showing that it conflates different notions of causation, their proposal for a dynamic systems answer to the mind-body problem is itself yet another supervenience claim in need of an explanation that justifies it. The same goes for their notion of “multiple supervenience.”.

A property, F, is maximal i?, roughly, large parts of an F are not themselves Fs. Maximal properties are typically extrinsic, for their instantiation by x depends on what larger things x is part of. This makes trouble for a recent argument against microphysical superve- nience by Trenton Merricks. The argument assumes that conscious- ness is an intrinsic property, whereas consciousness is in fact maximal and extrinsic.

Drawing on various resources and requirements (as expressed by Dewey, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom), this paper proposes an externalist view of conceptual mental episodes that does not equate them, even partially, with vehicles of any sort, whether the vehicles be located in the environment or in the head. The social and pragmatic nature of the use of concepts and conceptual content makes it unnecessary and indeed impossible to locate the entities that realize conceptual mental episodes in non-personal or subpersonal contentful (...) entities (vehicles). Persons, who engage in social practices of deontic scorekeeping (Brandom), and who are thus able to produce appropriate inferential behaviour, enact conceptual mental episodes and the basis of their supervenience. (shrink)

This collection brings together previously unpublished works by well-known philosophers on the philosophy of action, the metaphysics of causality, and the philosophy of psychology. Nine of the essays directly discuss Donald Davidson's work on these topics, while three others challenge a Davidsonian approach through discussion of independent but related issues. These essays are followed by replies from Davidson, including a previously unpublished essay, "Adverbs of Action.".

This paper examines the widespread intuition that the dynamical approach to cognitive science is importantly related to emergentism about the mind. The explanatory practices adopted by dynamical cognitive science rule out some conceptions of emergence; covering law explanations require a deducibility relationship between explanans and explanandum, whereas canonical theories of emergence require the absence of such deducibility. A response to this problem – one which would save the intuition that dynamics and emergence are related – is to reconstrue the concept (...) of emergence as a relationship between laws. I call this “nomological emergence” and comment on the extent to which dynamicists would find it acceptable. Alternatively, dynamical cognitive science might be viewed as fitting better with the kind of “functional reductionism” which has recently been developed by authors such as Jaegwon Kim. Which of these two alternatives is preferable remains an open question pending the further development of dynamical cognitive science, particularly in its “non-classical” forms. (shrink)

The manifestability argument presented by Papineau and Loewer turns on the premise that nonphysical properties are capable of making a difference to physical conditions. From this and the completeness of physics a strenuous supervenience conclusion is supposed to follow. I argue that the plausible version of this premise implies a weaker supervenience thesis only, one that is too weak to be of any use for a physicalist. There is a more contentious premise one might use to deduce the needed conclusion, (...) but that more contentious premise has no empirical support. (shrink)